eBay SEO: How to optimize your product listings on eBay to Boost Visibility

eBay is one of the world’s biggest e-commerce websites. Millions of people across the globe use it to sell and purchase items quickly. Over the past couple of years, it has flourished exponentially. Over 1 billion products are listed on eBay today. As of 2017, eBay has over 175 million buyers and 25 million registered sellers. (Source)

eBay is one of the best marketplaces for you to sell your products since it actively sells it across 190 international markets. With over a billion products, we can safely assume that the product that you are trying to sell already has some kind of competition on eBay. So, how do you tackle this competition and make sure that your product comes out on top of all the others? You can adopt a mix of the following 30 SEO strategies to make sure that your products listings receive the necessary boost for a better sale on the marketplace.

Add More Keywords

Keywords are your biggest ally on the eBay market. Without the necessary amount and quality of keywords, your product listing will never see the first few pages of search results on eBay. In fact, your product will be pushed down to lower rankings on the search results thereby never receiving enough views.

With the right set of keywords, your product will automatically rise to the top levels. You need to be extra careful while choosing the keywords for your products and use them judiciously. Using the keywords excessively might harm the readability of the product description. This can easily destroy the reputation of your product/store on eBay.

Make the Content More Readable

Make sure that your content is readable enough for the audience. Without good readability, you will easily lose potential customers on your product listing. Use subheadings and bold content to highlight the most interesting features for your product. By highlighting the content, you will make sure that the audience pays attention to the right features of the product. If possible, do add images that complement the features of the product.

You can use ornamental content for the description of your product too. However, make sure that you do not overuse this type of content and keep the description relevant.

Generate User-Specific Content

The best way to generate SEO-friendly content for the product is to step into the shoes of your customer and look for their requirements. When you write the content for your product, make sure that it answers the questions of the customers. Look for subtle and obvious questions that you might ask the seller if you wanted to purchase the product. Draft the content in a question-answer format so that the buyer can have answers to all the questions he/she might have about the product that you are trying to sell.

Generating user-specific content will also help you reduce the amount of time that you need to spend checking and answering questions that people ask for your product. It is a long-term investment that will reap results for your product and store.

Use Natural Language Tone (Long Tail Keywords)

The long tail keywords can help you build the necessary question-answer format of writing the content for the product. These keywords accommodate the short keywords in a friendly manner. They help you incorporate a lot of keywords without really stuffing them into the description. The long tail keywords also help you optimize the content for voice search. Today, voice search is getting more and more popular on both iOS as well as Android devices.

Make sure that your natural language queues are followed by a question mark at the end so that they can leverage the questions asked on the voice search engines.

Make Lists for the Content

Writing chunky paragraphs hampers the readability of the overall content for your product description. Instead of writing the description in an essay type format, try writing it in bullet points by enhancing the features of the product. You can write all the detailed specifications of the product in multiple bullet points to highlight them in the right manner.

If you cannot write phrases for the bullet points, you can write short sentences, with less 20 words each to complete the description. Making a list of the description not only makes the content more readable but also helps you segregate the most important features from the least important ones.

Use the Trending Keywords

Investing a considerable amount of time in keyword research is essential for the long run. It helps you make sure that your content stays viable and in the scope of potential audience for a long period. The use of trending keywords will put your product on the first few pages of the search engine results. Most people who are looking for a specific product will not come directly to eBay to look for it. Instead, they will browse the internet and search for it in Google. Use of trending keywords will ensure that they see your product first on the search engine results.

Perform Competitive Analysis

If you are not sure about what type of content you must write for your target audience, look at the product descriptions of other similar products. You can browse for similar products on multiple e-commerce websites to pick the most interesting way of writing the content.

Make sure that your content has a subtle and informational tone to it. An over-promotional tone is off-putting and can easily push potential customers away. With competitive analysis, you can pick up the necessary keywords from other product descriptions that make them so popular in the first place.

Update the Content Regularly

Posting the description for your product just once is not an option. Instead, you might have to revamp your content multiple times before you actually get it right. The best practices involve updating the content of your product description regularly so that it stays on top of the search results.

Updating the content regularly also helps you tackle the audience with fresh and trending keywords. You can tweak the product description slightly once every month to see the results and implement the practices that work the best for your store.

Focus on Local SEO

eBay allows you to sell and purchase products from across the globe. However, most people do not prefer buying products from global sellers. Instead, they rely on products that come from local sellers so that they don’t face a problem replacing the items in case it is damaged. While ideally, you should target a global audience, focusing on local SEO helps a lot.

By making sure that your content is designed to tackle the needs of a local audience, you can easily lure in customers from your locality. Local SEO techniques help you target a more niche segment of customers with ease.

Avoid Going After Keyword Unicorns

It is easy for a novice reseller to get entangled in the concept of unicorn keywords in the early stages of the career. Several people who claim to be ‘SEO Experts’ will tell you that a certain set of keywords will solve all your SEO problems in the blink of an eye. Instead of buying into this story, you should focus on providing true value to your potential customers. Don’t look for a magical set of keywords, instead, just think about what your customers truly want.

Let’s take a small example here. Let’s say that you are trying to sell a coffee mug on eBay. Now, instead of looking for fancy keywords that help you sell it, you should look for the key characteristics that the prospect would look for in a coffee mug. Now you can write the description accordingly. You can say that your coffee mug is durable, unbreakable, keeps the coffee hot for a long time, and looks trendy. A short description like this should help you get a good rank on the search results of the eBay search engine.

Break Down Content into Simple Words

Instead of using long and complex sentences to describe the product, you should break down the content into smaller digestible bites. By breaking down the content, you can easily place it into multiple bullet points for easy comprehension. Don’t stuff too many keywords into a single line. Instead, you can easily create multiple small phrases with a single keyword in each of them to maintain a good flow of content in the product description.

Redirect the Audience to Your Website

For a feature-rich product, writing short content is often a big problem. Writing to-the-point concise content can be a really big deal if you don’t do it in the right way. Under such circumstances, you can list the most important features of the product in the description and then provide a link at the end of the page that redirects them to your website. If the prospect wants to know more about the product, he/she can easily follow the link to land on your website and find a detailed description. This practice also helps you increase the visitor count for your website organically.

Keep it Short

It is easy for a new seller on eBay to get carried away with writing more and more details into the product description. While more details do help your case in certain cases, in most of the other cases it can just create problems. Instead of writing long essays on the product with a lot of fancy words, you can keep it short to capture the attention of the prospect. This way, you can easily capture the attention of your target audience and still make a quick sale without investing a lot of time into it.

Write Seller Intro

Most people who buy products on eBay check the description of the seller before doing so. Sellers with excellent reputation have no trouble selling products quickly. On the other hand, sellers with nearly no reviews or description will not make a sale easily. By writing a decent seller introduction you can easily make a quick sale. This seller introduction will also help you make a good reputation in the marketplace without investing a lot of money into advertising.

Include Keywords in the Main Description

You need to place the keywords from your content at strategic locations for them to give you the desired results. Make sure that you include the keywords in the main description of the product as well as your seller intro. It is a good idea to have a thematic array of things to sell on eBay because then you can easily upsell as well as cross-sell easily whenever you like.

Write Engaging Titles

Writing an engaging title for your product description is undoubtedly one of the hardest things you can on eBay. However, you can get inspiration from sellers of similar products. Now, you should never copy your competitors, however, look for design and content queues in their product description. Write an engaging title that directly goes with the needs of your prospects. Include the best feature of your product in the title. It is always a good idea to give preference to the functional element of your product rather than focusing on its aesthetic appeal while writing a title for the description.

Add ‘Purchase Intent’ Keywords

A certain set of keywords can help you bring sales-ready leads to your platform within a matter of minutes. You can classify the keywords mainly into two different types. The positive ones and the negative ones. When developing a website, you can use both these keywords simultaneously to make sure that you get sales-ready leads. While developing a website, you need to focus on using the positive keywords and avoid the use of negative keywords.

The positive keywords, also known as the purchase-intent keywords are the ones that help you attract attention from people who wish to purchase your product. On the other, the other generic keywords can attract people who just wish to gather more information on your product or are doing competitive research to launch their own products.

Add User Reviews and Ratings

The best way to show that your product is truly a class apart is to add great product reviews and ratings for it. People will go for the products that have tonnes of great reviews and completely avoid the ones that have bad reviews. Always try and add genuine product reviews instead of creating fake ones. The fake reviews can easily backfire on your reputation in an extremely short period.

Invest in Email Outreach Strategies

This tip works best for people who are selling more and one products at a time. The email outreach strategies help you reach out to your existing customers and lure them in for a better sale opportunity. This one-to-one marketing scheme will help you make your customers feel great and keep them in a sales cycle for a longer period.

Upsell, Resell and Cross-sell

You can easily upsell, resell as well as cross-sell the products in your portfolio with one-to-one digital marketing practices. Email marketing is one of the best ways to run your reselling operations smoothly.

Include Brand Name in the Description

People who love shopping online often prefer going for the big brand names. While they do look for the functionality of the product, the brand name holds a different value altogether for them. So, if you are selling branded products, make sure that you include the name of the brand a couple of times in the description. Make sure that you do not include the names of the brands that you are not selling to avoid any conflict in the future.

Write Detailed Description (Name, Size, Colour)

Detail-rich descriptions often help you make a quick sale since all the information that your buyer is looking for is presented in a readable format. By including the relevant details in the description, you can easily make a quick sale since the prospect will not be inclined to ask more questions. By leaving key details out of the description you open a room for conversation and this delays your sales further.

Use Bright, Colourful and Attractive Images

A lot of people make the mistake of using dull images for their products on eBay. When you are posting the images for the product, make sure that you choose pictures taken with ample lighting in a clear background. A bad picture or bad lighting will effectively ruin your chances of a sale on the platform. On the other hand, a good picture can easily help you sell a bad product too!

Create a Dedicated eBay Store

Make sure that you have a dedicated eBay store to cater to the needs of your existing customers as well as prospects. You can start a mini-store with one or two products in the initial stages. As your store gains traction, you can easily include more products to lure in customers from a wider spectrum. It is a good idea to create your entire line-up of products around a singular theme. This helps you with cross-sell, resell as well as upsell opportunities.

Classify Your Product Correctly on eBay

If you haven’t classified your product under the right section, your product will not be visible to the audience. In fact, your product will never even appear in the search results. While posting the ad for the product, make sure that you classify it under the right section. If you are confused with the section that you have to classify your product with, search for similar products first. This will give you a fair idea of how to classify your product.

Optimize Images/Content for Mobile Interface

A lot of people actively use the eBay mobile application. Nearly 370 million people have already downloaded the application on their smartphones. (Source) You cannot lose prospects only because your product description lacks the necessary optimization for the mobile interface. By using adaptable images, you can make sure that the images for your product are viewable even on the small screen very effectively.

Promote Products with Offers

In the initial stages of your eBay campaigns, you will face difficulty in marketing your product and competing with the bigger stores. Under such circumstances, you need to lure in customers with competitive price tags and special offers. If you plan on giving a special offer to the new customers, make sure that you highlight the offer in bold so that it goes unnoticed. You might want to edit the images of your product to showcase the offer too.

Provide Free Return Policy

Partner up with a reliable shipping agency to offer a free return policy for the products. Only a handful of people really opt for the return option anyway. If you are sure about the high-quality of product, your customers will never have to opt for this service. Having this type of service helps you give an assurance to the customers that you are selling a high-quality product. It also suggests that you would willingly replace this product if the customer is not satisfied with its quality.

Focus on Product as well as Seller Specific SEO

You need to lay an equal amount of emphasis on the product as well as seller specific SEO to ensure that your products are received well on the platform. Compromising on either of these can affect your overall ad campaign very negatively.

Have a Fast Response Time

Having an excellent response time to customer queries helps a lot on eBay. If you are growing at a quick pace, you might want to hire dedicated human resources to answer the queries that your prospects might post on the discussion for your product.

These 30 tips will help you revamp your entire eBay SEO efforts and make a quick sale. It will also help you establish a firm reputation in the marketplace where your customers can place their trust in you for the long run.

Author:Kerry Tiwana

Dear Visitors, My name is +Kerry Tiwana and I’m part time blogger. Here on my blog you are about to find many articles about SEO, social media, blogging and make money online. I love to write them, when I have free time, so don’t judge me and enjoy my blog. you can follow me on facebook.
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